Chair of trustees
Meet our chair of trustee specialists
To be effective as a chair of a pension trustee board takes a broad range of skills, from excellent communication to strong technical knowledge. Bringing experience from across hundreds of different schemes, our experienced and friendly professional trustees offer invaluable, independent guidance to your trustee board, whilst also responding to the specific needs of your scheme.
Why appoint us as chair of trustees?
As chair of trustees we:
We pride ourselves on our ability to effectively manage a pension scheme and all those involved in running it. Our personable team understands a pension trustee board is at its most effective when everybody feels able to express their views, with no one person dominating or overshadowing others.
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Manage a board of both employer nominated and member nominated trustees whilst ensuring all voices are heard and a diverse range of opinions are gathered.
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Ensure operational matters run smoothly, working alongside the scheme secretary (whether they are a colleague from Vidett or not).
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Oversee relationships with advisers and other service providers, using our market knowledge and position to ensure services are high quality, well-scoped and represent good value for money.
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Identify gaps in trustee’s knowledge, ensure trustee board effectiveness and provide trustee training.
The benefits of our approach
Our approach to professional trusteeship gives you the benefit of both personal attention from your professional chair of trustees and the knowledge and experience of one of the UK’s largest professional trustee firms.
Your pension scheme will get the time and personal attention it deserves from a Vidett professional trustee who is always as approachable as they are insightful.
At the same time, our knowledge sharing, team based approach ensures at least two named individuals will have a detailed knowledge of your pension scheme. It means someone will always be available to respond to queries, manage the advisers and progress trustee business – you are never dependent on one person.
When we’re appointed as chair of trustees we operate a unique onboarding process. Your professional, independent trustee and support team from Vidett will sit down with your pension trustee board and truly understand the nuances of the scheme they are appointed to.
This allows us to build an effective partnership by:
- getting to know both the pension scheme and its sponsor
- understanding any existing frustrations or challenges with the scheme
- identifying where the trustee board is at, and where they’d like to get to
- quickly getting up to speed with operational matters, work in progress with pension advisers/administrators etc
Case study
Food for thought: protecting members
We were the acting Chair of Trustees of a pension scheme with a sponsor in the food retail sector. The company had over 500 shops and 110,000 staff in the UK, with combined assets of £5.6bn.
The sponsor was actively in discussions regarding a potential takeover. As a result, the pension trustees were concerned the proposals would materially weaken the covenant supporting the schemes. Additional support was needed to safeguard 80,000 members’ pensions and to ensure the schemes could complete their journey plan to buy out.
The background
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We were the acting Chair of Trustees of a pension scheme with a sponsor in the food retail sector. The company had over 500 shops and 110,000 staff in the UK, with combined assets of £5.6bn.
The sponsor was actively in discussions regarding a potential takeover. As a result, the pension trustees were concerned the proposals would materially weaken the covenant supporting the scheme. Additional support was needed to safeguard 80,000 members’ pensions and to ensure the scheme could complete their journey plan to buy out.
Our solution
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As Chair of Trustees our pragmatism and commercial knowledge was vital. We worked with multiple stakeholders including the company, two bidders, the trustee board and The Pensions Regulator (TPR) to bring all parties together and help maintain constructive relationships.
The outcome
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Our intervention helped secure a strong mitigation package including:
- security over freehold properties held within a pension funding partnership structure;
- a mechanism for gradual release of additional security as the scheme approach buy out;
- enhanced governance provisions; and
- additional security rights.
We used our skills and experience to support the trustee board through a high-pressure period. This allowed them to emerge from negotiations with a great deal for the members and a stronger relationship with the company.